Because sufficiently advanced AI will start getting rights of its own, and at a certain point there will be enough AI around that we can't just say "no, you're not allowed, this tournament is HUMANS ONLY". And then the AI will have well and truly won.
Granted, we're talking fairly far into the future - like at least two decades from now. But it'll happen. (I'm not sure we'll care at that point, however.)
Well, that's the thing - the only thing stopping it from going much further is the lack of hardware with which to make more calculations.
It's easy to get scared of Strong AI.
Then you remember AI clusters still can't run a half-decent image recognition algorithm or process context properly in conversation.
Strong AI isn't happening on silicon, and is generally very unlikely to happen ethically, as it's pretty hard to give value to something that can be created in virtual limitless quantities in milliseconds. Humanoid robots make for good sci-fi, but don't make any sense - if there's going to be strong AI, it's going to be networked.
Narrow AIs for some fields and most games will, indeed, happen. It's been happening for a while. But strong AI is very far out, and if it'll happen, there's not going to be much reason for having large numbers of those.
And "Very Far" is "50-500 years", not 20.
